Few days ago, I published a small article on EzineArticles.com about “Small Business starts small - Does domain name matter?” Choosing a domain for your small business is as important as host your domain and web site. If you just start a new small business, you will have to host your domain somewhere and finally get your web site up. Now you have a domain name, but you have no idea where to host your web site.

First of all, it does matter how much your hosting budget allows and what you will do with your web site. Are you selling goods on the internet, or just provide web based services to others, or you just want to have a company web site to show people that you are in business. Most small business owners have no idea about the modern internet technology, they have spent a lot of time put together their business plan and ready to move forward. Now they are hesitate because they don’t know where to start their business with Internet. I will give you some basic guide line to choose your hosting company without getting ripped off by those ridiculous hosting plans.

Let’s assume you are selling products and requires a merchant account, which is the most complicated hosting for small business to end with. These are the requirements you need to operate your business.

  1. A Merchant account to accept online online payment.
  2. A web site with shopping cart that can process customer order and process payment.
  3. Hosting at least one domain. Sometimes with multiple domains. This can be done through parked domain, domain forwarding, or add-on domain features.
  4. Lots email address to use. Let’s assume you need 200 email address. That is a lot of email to do small business. I have never use more than the following emails. info, sales, customerservices, webmaster, security, privacy, admin and so on. Of course, you will need one email for each of your employees. Most of hosting companies give you more than 1000 email address, which is enough to run a corporation.
  5. Mailing List for people to subscribe your newsletter or company press release
  6. A stable server that you can count on without change your hosting provider every few months.
  7. A true 24/7 customer services and tech support with really phone number to contact.
  8. A fast and easy to use web control panel to manage your web hosting account.

So how do we choose the hosting company to start with? In my case, I need an e-commerce web site to host my online store.

First of all, you need to decide what platform to host your e-commerce web site. In my case, I pick Linux/FreeBSD based hosting running PHP, MySQL, and Apache web server. It gives me pretty much control through the cpanel control panel. the main reason to user Linux based hosting is the price. Most of shared linux hosting charge you about US$8.00 per months with huge disk space and bandwidth. You can grow easy to dedicated box with half price of Windows platform.

There are many different free open source and commercial shopping carts that you can find to host your own products. I, personally, do not recommend to host at Yahoo small business web hosting. It’s pretty easy to setup for small store without a lot of customization. If you need to customize your store layout and looking, you will end up hire someone knows “RTML”, who can modify your layout. It costs you $1000-$5000+ at front to add more features to your store. Or you will have to learn the proprietary language by yourself. I spent 2 months and finally give up. My store is using os-commerce based open source shopping cart. You can download it from zen-cart.com. You can also download some extra plug-in to enhance your store features. Install the shopping cart is as easy as saying ABC. I get my site up in one day and spent two weeks to customize. Now it’s up and running for months and start making profit.

A merchant account is the next biggest decision. Most of merchant providers charge you US$20/month for statement fee and access to their payment gateway plus transaction fee. There are few I have dealt with and felt conformable with. Authorize.net and Paypal. For me, I choose Paypal’s low fee to process my transactions, since I am also doing auction on eBay. However, all my e-commerce clients are using authorize.net. Authorize.net has been in the industry for many many years. They have the most robust API to integrate with pretty much every web programming language. Other choice is to integrate with Amazon’s e-store, which will cost you more to list items on their store.

Choose your web hosting server wisely. The customer service is the most important key to your online business. If you site is down all the time, you will lost business and lost reputation to your customers. I was hosting my site on HostingZoom.com and the site was up and down since I signed up. My database was even totally removed and rebuilt twice the first two weeks. Avoid hosting company like that.

Don’t ever host with those company do NOT have 24/7 support line. Make calls to them day and night and over weekend to see if someone is picking up and answer your questions. Try chat with them online, and see if anyone is available 24/7. And make sure their support is in your local country. Some hosting company out source their online support to other country. So they will never be able to take a look at your physical server from their. Yes. They can monitor the server and pass your ticket on to their tier two support, but it usually takes 24-48 hours to response back to you.

After all, the most critical piece of you online business is how you run it and manage it. It’s very easy to setup an e-commerce store, but you have to run it for a long term. It’s hard to build a good reputation online.

Good luck on your online adventure. Drop me a line if you have any questions.

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